Henchmen (20 page)

Door number 3, the lair of the Sleeper, is the last door on the right, and it looks exactly like the others.  If I’m wrong, the key will probably get wiped and we’ll be stuck down here forever.

“You’re sure it won’t open Room 2?” Eve asks.

“I don’t know, it might.  It might only open 1.  I’m hoping it only opens three, because that’s the one I think we need.”

I put the key in the hole and pull it out. For a moment, my heart drops through my stomach when the door does absolutely nothing.  Before I start to panic, the door quietly slides apart, and we are the first people in eight years to see what the spooks who ran this place called “The Sleeper.”

The room is square, about a hundred feet on a side, and packed with various flashing lights in a cacophony of colors.  Tiny lights flashing in the near darkness, like stars lighting up the dusk sky.  There’s a hum from the fans of dozens of computers.  Dropping from the ceiling and scattered around the room are strange looking instruments designed to do or measure God only knows what.  Some of them are straight out of a mad scientist movie.

The corpse of a dead security guard is curled in a ball right in front of the platform, lying in a brown pool of dried blood.  Eve turns him over and his eyeless face is covered in dried blood and scratches, like he clawed his own eyes out and his mouth is still agape in a silent scream of terror.

A few feet from the security guard is a guy, probably a tech from the look of him.  The back of his head is blown off and a dead hand is still gripping a Colt .45.  Colt .45 the gun, not Colt .45 the beer.

“Damn,” she says.

“Yeah,” I reply.  My normally free-flowing flippant comments have abandoned me for the time being.

All around the room are signs about not throwing things.  Someone has taped a child’s picture of a sleeping man to one of the computer monitors, complete with his dreams in a thought bubble.  There are rolling chairs scattered around the room, like someone got up in a hurry and didn’t look where he was going.  A woman’s shoe lies in the middle of the floor.  A couple of coffee cups are tipped over, and there are papers strewn around the place.  An open folder, the first page stamped
TOP SECRET
lies open next to someone’s wallet.

“Whatever happened here happened fast,” I say. “They didn’t even have a chance to pick things up.”

I’m focused on the computer stations.  I used to work with systems very similar to these, usually trying to harden them against outside threats, and a small part of my mind is disgusted at how many machines are unlocked.  I move the mouse on one of the machines, and the desktop pops up, showing me a Windows XP desktop with yellow and black striped borders at the top.  The script over the borders proudly proclaims this to be a system that was used for processing classified.  That’s not a typo. In the secure world, when you work with classified material, you are “processing classified.”  This place would definitely fail a security audit.

Eve grabs my shoulder.

“What?” I ask.

She turns me away from the computers and points toward the center of the room.

The centerpiece of the room is a raised platform surrounded by an intricate, glowing mandala of concentric circles, spirals, and stylized flames carved into the floor.  There are words written in a language I don’t recognize, and whole thing pulses and glows like it’s a living thing.  The mandala is made of blue and white light circling endlessly around, crackling slightly.

Around the platform, about ten feet from it, is a fence made of steel tubing painted yellow with black stripes.  The striped paint job is the traditional way of screaming “Don’t touch, danger!” and it does a pretty good job of it.  You could easily climb over it if you wanted to but the signs all around that say “DO NOT PASS THIS FENCE. USE OF DEADLY FORCE IS AUTHORIZED” are an effective deterrent.  This is not a fence to keep something in; any idiot could get through it.  This was to keep people out and let them know business was meant.

In the center is a man, calmly watching us.

He’s an older gentleman in a double-breasted suit and fedora.  He’s leaning at a jaunty angle on his cane.  His suit is dark navy with gray pinstripes, and is absolutely immaculate.  If you think about it, this is pretty impressive feat for someone living underground for nearly a decade.  Come to think of, the whole look screams 1930s, which was an amazing time for suits.

“Well,” I say.  “This is kind of anticlimactic.”

Here I’d thought we were looking for something terrifying - something worthy of all the secrecy, and an abandoned underground base.  Hell, this place was guarded by a monster!  This should be a terrifying moment. Instead, all we get a guy in a nice suit. 

Granted, it’s a really nice suit.

“Uh,” I ask, “Just out of curiosity, where’d you get the suit? And do you suspect they might have one in my size?  I’m, uh, asking for a friend, you understand.  He’s my size.”

He looks at me for a moment, exuding cool.

“If I tell you, will you let me out of here?” he asks.

“What’s keeping you in?” I ask him.

“Magic.  Science.  Whatever,” he says.  “All you need to do is break the circle, walk over and shake my hand.  Or you could just toss me that baseball.”

I walk toward him and Eve stops me.  “Don’t cross the lines. You’ll collapse the circle.”

“What happens if I collapse the circle?” I ask.

“You release me,” the man says.

Eve points at him.  “Collapse the circle, and he walks free.”

“Isn’t that the point of coming here?” I ask.

“Yes,” The man says.  “Listen to your boss.”

“Excuse me?” Eve says.

The man eyes me.  “I’m terribly sorry, madam. I had assumed it was the other way around.  Listen to your henchman.”

He’s slick, I’ll give him that.  I’ve never actually been called a henchman before, but it’s far from the worst thing I’ve ever been called.  I guess henching is as good a job as any these days.  I don’t get dental insurance, but I do get to break into government installations.

“How long have you been in there?” I ask him.

“I woke up eight years ago to find myself stuck in this place.”

“Eight years?  What have you been eating?” Eve asks.

“Nothing, here.  Part of me of is outside the circle, and an even smaller part is outside this building. Unfortunately, the parts outside the building are damaged, and no longer entirely reliable.”

The shadows seem to come to life and move around us.  They circle and form complex two-dimensional shapes, like mandalas and fractals, then seem to explode into tiny squares that reform across the room.

“Those shadows,” Eve says, “They’re part of you, aren’t they?”

“They are me.  As much as your skin is you.  When they closed the circle, part of me was outside, and the people who built this place didn’t realize it.  When I woke up, I used those parts to try to free myself, but the circle is too strong.  Your people have learned well.  For all his fluff and bluster, Bedfellow actually managed to hold me.  I can’t wait to kill him.”

“Wait a minute.  Bedfellow?” I ask him.

“He called himself Senator Lucius Bedfellow.  He was a tiresome man, but not without his powers.  He locked me in here and ordered this place closed when he found I was awake and not fully controlled.”

“I’ve got bad news for you, pal.  Bedfellow is already dead.  I killed him a couple of years ago,” I say.

They say revenge never fixes anything - that it doesn’t change what happened, that it doesn’t make the pain go away. To a certain extent, they’re correct.  Pain has a half-life: over time it lessens, but it never completely goes away.  My family will never come back to me.  I will never have my old life back again.  I will never again wake up, and feel like things are safe. 

I used to get enraged, thinking about how I was powerless to stop that madman from abusing his power.  Now, whenever I get mad or feel powerless, I remember Bedfellow bound, gagged, wearing lingerie and turning purple while he slowly died in front of me.  That memory always makes me feel better.

After all, you can’t go through life angry all the time.

“You killed him?” he asks me.

I nod.

“Your memories - I must have them.  I have waited so long to see him die.  Will you share your memories with me?”

I’ve got a bad feeling about this, but say, “Okay.”

“I promise I won’t hurt you,” he says.

Some of the shadows coalesce into a singular form that looks almost like an amoeba made of darkness.  It silently slides across the floor and wraps around my feet.  As it slides up my legs I feel a slight chill, but I can tell it’s not actively trying to hurt me.  I have a moment of panic as it makes its way up my torso and around my neck, but shove the panic down and close my eyes.  The shadow wraps around my face and I faintly hear Eve say “Hurt him and you’ll never get out of here.”

Distantly, like it’s coming from down the hall and around the corner through a closed door I hear The Sleeper say, “I promise you, I will not hurt him,” and then I’m back in Bedfellow’s bedroom. The Sleeper is standing right next to me, watching Bedfellow standing on a chair in lingerie and cuffs and a gag, noose around his neck, desperately trying to masturbate.

The room is just like it was before - overpriced, overdecorated, and desperately detailed.  There are large white blocks on the wall that I don’t remember from before, and most of the area on the other side of the bed is plain white.  It takes me moment, but then I realize I’m reliving a memory, and must not have looked at those places, so my mind is filling them in with blank white areas.

“My, my, my,” The Sleeper tells me.  “Lucius was quite the interesting character.  What is he doing?”

I look at him quizzically.  I had kind of thought it was obvious.

“You’ll have to excuse me,” he tells me, “I’ve never really understood human mating habits.  Although, I must say, I don’t see anyone here for him to mate with.  Perhaps you didn’t see her? Or him?”

How do you explain masturbation to someone?  Hell, for that matter how do you explain bondage, or cross-dressing, or auto-erotic asphyxiation to someone?

“He was into kink,” I say.

He looks at me again, confused.  “May I dig deeper into your mind?”

Sure, why the fuck not?  I’m already standing in the bedroom of dead guy with some kind of supernatural being next to me.  It’s got to be less painful than trying to explain kink to a god.

I nod and say, “Ok.”

He closes his eyes and I feel a slight tingle as he pushes further into my mind.

After a few moments he opens his eyes and laughs out loud.  “Oh, this is delicious!  Lucius Bedfellow, the man who owned me, the man who controlled me!  Did you see him die?”

I nod.  “Yeah. It took a while, but I watched the whole thing.”

“I must see that.  Oh! Look!  He’s noticed you’re here.”

Again I get to relive killing Senator Lucius Bedfellow.  I get to hear him trying to plead for his life through a gag. I get to watch him drool, and blubber, and plead with me with his eyes to please just let him live - he’ll do anything; give me anything.

Just like before, Bedfellow can’t give me the one thing I really want. Too bad.

The difference this time is that I have someone else with me.  Someone who stares in wide-eyed wonder at the man on the chair. Who laughs out loud when Bedfellow tries to talk, and who claps when I nudge the chair and Bedfellow’s high-heeled shoes start to slide off. And when Bedfellow can’t stop his feet from sliding because he’s chained his own ankles together, the man in the suit applauds and cries “Bravo!”

After we watch Bedfellow die, we stare at him, gently rotating on the rope, until the memory ends and my remembered self gets up to go.  Then the memory pauses, and I’m watching myself leaving the room, but frozen in time.

I look at the man in the suit and try to figure him out.  On the one hand, he seems to be just a normal guy, on the other hand I am looking at him in a memory.  He’s wandering around the room, examining things and chuckling to himself.  “Who are you?” I finally ask him.

“People in this area of the country used to call me a God of Dreams.  The Rememberer.  I can be anything I dream up, or anything anyone else dreams up.  I’ve been a destroyer, a builder.  I’m chaos and order.  I don’t have a name, and don’t really need one, but you may call me anything you wish if it will help.”

“How about Dreamer?” I ask him.

“I do love to dream,” he says.

“How did they trap you?”

He sighs.  “I love to sleep, and I love to dream.  When you’re immortal, you can sleep for decades. Dreams become your best friends, because they don’t die around you.  Try as I might - dream as I can - I cannot stop death in others.  She’s uninterested in me, but maintains her single-minded intensity with everyone else.  While I was sleeping, someone found me.  This man you killed coerced some local shamans, what do they call them?  Medicine Men.  They built the circle around me.  I gather I was to be his ultimate weapon.”